INTRODUCTION: Nursing professionals (NPs) experience musculoskeletal pain that leads them to leave work. Objective: To analyze the effects of muscle stretching exercises (MSE) on pain among NPs. METHOD: This is a randomized controlled parallel experiment, in which 28 NPs (7 men and 21 women) were allocated into experimental (EG, n = 15; 47.4 years +/- 9.5) and control (CG, n = 13; 39.15 years +/- 9.6) groups. MSEs were performed for two months, three days a week, 40 min per session. A visual numeric scale was used, for which the intensity ranged from 0 (no pain) to 10 (maximum pain). The research was registered at the Brazilian Clinical Trials Registry website (trial RBR-8chg6q). For statistics, the Shapiro-Wilk, t-independent and two-way ANOVA tests were applied for repeated measures with Tukey's post-hoc test (p = 0.05). RESULTS: Most NPs work on weekends (68%) and/or have other professional activities (60.7%); 42.9% had to miss work at least once in the year prior to the survey and 66.7% of those were due to medical reasons; 42.9% work more than 10 hours/day. Of the NPs, 89.3% of the volunteers in both groups lived daily with pain in some region of the body. Pain decreased after the MSE program was initiated in the EG (p = 0.001) and differed from the CG (p = 0.002). CONCLUSION: MSEs were beneficial for pain reduction in NPs.

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